Quality Management in Neurosurgical Nursing

Abstract

During the past the increasing public interest in cutting down health care expenses and the growing awareness of the need for quality control in health care delivery necessitated to develop new ways of nursing care for hospitalised inpatients. These requirements do not only include trials to cut down costs by reducing the number and duration of in-hospital stays but also services which should be undertaken before the patient is admitted to the hospital as well as the care needed after discharge from the hospital. The development of new nursing care measures was also necessary to meet the needs going along with the increasing number of elderly patients with multiple diseases as well as the rapid turnover of new treatment modalities. In the following we will report on the development of standardized nursing protocols in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University over the past 5–10 years which were set up in order to solve certain problems arising from changes in the health care system in Germany and to meet some demands put forward by the nurses themselves.